From Squarespace to Hostinger-Hosted WordPress | Migration Challenges and Triumphs

A great deal has changed with the blog this week:

1. We finally have a logo and/or mascot!
2. Our website’s layout has changed.
3. We’ve left Squarespace hosting for WordPress hosted by Hostinger and I have a slew of bugs to resolve and new features to enable.
4. The email-driven subscription feature that was hosted at MailChimp has been replaced by Jetpack/WordPress integrations.
5. We are no longer an Amazon Affiliate and are not actively pursuing monetization at this time.

New Logo / Mascot

He doesn’t have a name yet, but my 7 year old made him for me when she saw me looking at AI-Generated site logos. Her creativity is so much better than what the AI generated.

Layout Changes

This WordPress theme is a bit like our old Squarespace theme and our original theme melded together. It works for now, but I’m open to feedback in the future. I must admit when I looked at all the theme choices available in the WordPress Pantheon I was a bit overwhelmed. I tried a dozen or more before settling on this hack of the Blogus theme. Post comments with feedback if you have suggestions for improvement.

Squarespace to WordPress on Hostinger

We’ve had a pretty good run with Squarespace, but I have run into platform limitations, support responsiveness issues, and increasing costs. Sadly, for the cost of 1 site/yr on Squarespace, I’m now able to host with a business-grade plan on Hostinger for 4 years.

In all, I’m happy, but leaving Squarespace was not without peril. If you’re wondering why we’re now on WordPress it’s because that’s the only data format that Squarespace would export to and the fastest for us to make the switch to a production site. Prior to last week, I’ve had zero experience with WordPress and all of that has changed, as I had to complete the migration by this past Monday to avoid renewal at Squarespace.

As it stands, all of our images and content is available; however, you may experience some bad links and formatting issues as I manually correct posts that were mangled between platforms. This is a work in progress and I’m about halfway through all of our legacy posts. Please comment on this post if you find shenanigans.

MailChimp to Jetpack for Email Subscribers

If you’re wondering why you received this post from a new platform, it’s because Jetpack/WordPress subscription functionality is much easier for us to maintain without the complexity and limitations of the free tier at MailChimp. All active subscribers were imported into Jetpack and should not experience a disruption of service.

No Longer Participating in Amazon Affiliates

Early in our blogging adventures we tried to immediately monetize our site to offset hosting costs and that was a definite mistake. Rewards often come in time and we’ve decided to focus on content over revenue generation. We experimented with Ads and then with integrated links to products that we’ve reviewed. And while Amazon Affiliates was successful for a bit, we just have been so busy as parents and new Iowans that we haven’t had a chance to keep up with the content demands to make proper use of Amazon’s program. As I correct blog posts for layout issues, I will be removing all affiliate links and product placements.

Conclusion

Thanks for supporting us all these years with your continued readership. We have more content coming soon. We should have most of the  issues resolved in the next couple of days.